viz.

Image Credit: salon.com

Today is National Eros Day. If all goes as planned couples everywhere will exchange love tokens, consume chocolate, and passionately express their love for one another. Even if we poke fun at them, these are some of the conventions of Valentine's Day just like grilling and fireworks are conventional for the Fourth of July. But Valentine's Day is a peculiar holiday because many of its conventions--and certainly its iconography--are literary (instead of religious, nationalistic, or folkloric). To my knowledge it's the only widely celebrated holiday that, simply by virtue of its subject matter, has its own well-established poetic tradition and form: the tradition of courtly love poetry and the form of the sonnet.  I ask the reader to accept this slightly shaky premise as I make the claim, just for fun, that Valentine's Day makes us all into poets. 

Image Credit: Ubu.com

It seems obvious that sight would be a natural starting point for any analysis of the mixed-mode of expression known as “concrete” or “visual” poetry, in which elements such as typography, pattern, word-arrangement, and text-image juxtaposition replace more conventional techniques of rhyme, syntax, and meter. Over the past week, however, two separate encounters have compelled me to think about how the tactility and transience of this form is possibly more fundamental than its appeal to sight. One of these experiences pertains to my discovery of Ubuweb’s fascinating archive of film in the field of concrete and visual poetics. The other has to do with my subsequent meeting with a local artist and concrete poet, who gave me one of his 3x3 trading card compositions. This unplanned, uncanny coincidence has made me consider how concrete poetry might encourage a shift from the scrutiny of the eye (the surface-depth model of close reading) to the gestures of the hand (holding and retaining, offering and receiving).